Things

Things, things, wherever you may be, you fill our hearts and our heads with glee and we’ll hail you all, wherever you are from and a massive thanks to our postman John. T-shirt, illustration, couple of lovely publications and a right royal surprise make up this week’s collection.

Ranks London T-Shirt Daniel David Freeman

There’s so much t-shirt design – from the sublime to the ridiculous – that it’s rare that anything ever really jumps out at you. However weird half-human, half-bird/reptile beings in smart casual weekend wear stepping out of a picture frame, yeah, that’ll probably do it. Daniel David Freeman is a very talented young man and this shirt for Ranks London combines a surreal whimsy with bang-on execution. www.danieldavidfreeman.com

Monarchy Melissa Price

Remember those wooden rulers you used to get with all the kings and queens of England on them? Well designer Melissa Price has dragged that principle into the 21st century with Monarchy a beautiful, crisp, colour-coded list of the 41 people to have presided over these fair isles since 1066. With at-a-glance guides to their religion, nationalities and the ways they bowed out, it’s history gone gorgeous.www.cargocollective.com/melissaprice

Demo Andrew Moffitt and Mark Moffitt

Issue 4 of Australian music magazine Demo winged its way to us this week and a jolly good job it did too. Focussing on emerging Aussie talent it’s really well-designed and well-written, but it’s the photography that really stands out – unusual, diverse and powerful. There aren’t too many freebies that rise above the rest – others could do a lot worse than to follow Demo’s lead.www.demomagazine.com.au

Unstable Sticklands/Decipherable Sticklands Henry McCausland

We had a bumper response after featuring Henry McCausland’s stunning illustration on the site a week or so ago, and the man himslef was decent enough to pop a couple of his comics in the post. And glory be Unstable Sticklands and Decipherable Sticklands didn’t disappoint, and we’re pleased to report that his charming, narrative style works just as well in black and white, and in long form. Cheers Henry!www.henrymccausland.com

Buffalo Adrian Gonzalez

There’s something about an inaugural issue that gets our hearts racing – all that promise and potential thanks to the late-nights, design-fights and tightly-skirted deadlines. With more than 150 pages, Buffalo zine out of Madrid packs a weighty punch, but the ambitious approach is vindicated by a cacophony of great multilingual content – including interviews, photo essays and prose extracts. Standing by for Issue Two chaps! www.buffalozine.com

We’ve been extolling the virtues of graphic designer Sean Freeman since way back in 2008 when some of you were likely still in short trousers and I was at university saying pretentious things about poems I’d half-cribbed from York Notes. In all that time our love for his work hasn’t faded, and while seven years ago we were content to devote just 11 words to Sean, today we’ll dedicate a few more to him to bring you some great recent work.

“It’s a funny thing actually,” Tony Brook tells me, pointing to a series of three posters which have been reprinted especially for design studio Spin’s new exhibition, which opens today. “I was saying this morning to the guys who were putting the show up, when we first made those posters they all just went. 125, bang! Immediately! And we thought that was what would happen every time, because we’d never made anything before. We were disabused of that illusion fairly quickly.”

Spanish studio Clase bcn was tasked with creating the promotional material for The Palau de la Música Catalana’s 2015-2016 season and the result is a playful but refined identity. Encompassing the building’s grandeur, huge banners line the corridors of the concert hall, showcasing the events and people appearing at the Palau, tying them together with a border of lush colours to echo the hall’s eclectic programme. Made up of fragmented shapes the boarder has been translated wonderfully into the other areas of the identity, appearing in milky-coloured pamphlets and a sturdy book.

Annual reports aren’t the most exciting sounding of entities, but in the right hands, they can certainly become beautiful. Take Manchester agency Music’s designs for the British Fashion Council’s 2014/15 annual review. With an all-black cover, gorgeous imagery and bold typography, you’d do well to tell it apart from a slick coffee table tome. The book showcases the BFC’s “five strategic pillars”, according to Music; Business, Education, Innovation & Digital, Investment and Reputation, with imagery from events including London Fashion Week, the British Fashion Awards and London Collections Men.

It goes without saying that we receive more information from screens than we do from paper. But posters are such a superb platform for graphic design experimentation that they seem unlikely to become obsolete. Instead, they’re adapting, and a wonderful example of that shapeshifting is in the smart moving posters of agency Wonder Room. The man behind them is Steve Hockett, who made them in response to seeing his poster designs diluted for online platforms.

You know what we’re like, always going all gaga over pretty colours and GIFS like little typing magpies. But we’re not all about a pretty picture over here at It’s Nice That; and neither is designer Evan Grothjan. While we admit we were initially drawn in by his vivid tones and abstract compositions, it turns out there’s a lot more to his Spaces series than crowd-pleasing aesthetics. Instead, the images form an ongoing investigation into the relationship between space and emotion; something Evan’s been interested in since studying animation as part of his Rhode Island School of Design course.